How Can I Make Google Crawl My Sitemap Every 12 Hours?

Google Search Console does not provide a built-in feature to schedule sitemap crawling at fixed intervals like every 12 hours. The frequency of sitemap crawling is determined by Google’s algorithms, which rely on factors such as website authority, update frequency, internal linking, and the crawl budget for your domain. There is currently no way to programmatically force Google to crawl your sitemap at a regular fixed interval from your side, and external programs or scripts cannot make Googlebot fetch the sitemap more frequently than Google decides.

Improving Google Sitemap Crawling

• Ensure your sitemap is accessible and listed in your robots.txt file.
• Keep your sitemap up to date and error-free, and resubmit it in Google Search Console if there are issues.
• Use the “Request Indexing” feature in Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool for important URLs, but this doesn’t enforce automatic, recurring crawls for the entire sitemap.
• Enhance your site’s internal linking, update content regularly, and gain authoritative backlinks to encourage more frequent crawling by Googlebot.
• Tools like Screaming Frog or dynamic sitemap generators can schedule and update your sitemap automatically on your server, but they do not affect how often Google crawls it—only how current your sitemap is.

No Program Exists for Interval-Based Crawl Requests

• There is no official program or API to make Google crawl your sitemap every 12 hours. Attempting to automate this externally (e.g., by resubmitting the sitemap repeatedly or using scripts) will not override Google’s own crawl scheduling, and such techniques may be ignored or even seen as spammy behavior.

Actionable Steps

• Make sure your sitemap URL is correct, public, and referenced in robots.txt.
• Fix any crawl errors or “Couldn’t fetch” issues by ensuring the sitemap is live and reachable.
• For new or updated content, use the “Request Indexing” feature on key pages, but do not rely on this for all URLs or regular crawling.
• Focus on improving site quality, structure, and authority, which can organically increase crawl frequency.

Google may sometimes take days or weeks between sitemap crawls, but ensuring your configuration and site quality are optimal is the best approach.